The Prophet of Berkeley Square

A deliciously odd Victorian comedy about a man who believes he can see the future, and the anxiety that comes with knowing too much. Hennessey Vivian, nicknamed the Prophet, has retreated to the comfortable beige world of Berkeley Square with his eccentricity-immune grandmother, Mrs. Merillia, where he spends his nights studying the stars through a telescope and his days making increasingly unsettling predictions. When he prophecies an accident befalling his beloved grandmother, the prophecy itself becomes a kind of prison, and he's left watching the clock, the sky, and her every movement, wondering whether he's witnessing fate or merely inviting it. Hichens constructs a gently farcical domestic scene populated by a long-suffering butler and one of literature's most unflappable elderly women, but beneath the comedy lies a genuinely unsettling question: if you could see disaster coming, what would you do? Would you try to stop it, and if you did, would you be defying fate or fulfilling it? The novel occupies a delightful niche: part drawing-room comedy, part philosophical ghost story, asking what responsibility we bear for knowledge we'd rather not have.